1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a captioned video playback apparatus which processes caption lines and video images.
2. Description of the Related Art
Unexamined Japanese Patent Application KOKAI Publication No. 2003-18491 discloses a caption display device. The caption display device stores a video image and a plurality of caption lines in the video image, and displays any caption line, when selected by a user, and a video image corresponding to the selected caption line.
The caption display device displays a video image and a plurality of caption lines on the same screen. When the display area for a video image is limited, therefore, the display area for a caption line is limited too. Depending on the number of characters in a caption line, therefore, the visibility and operability of the screen, when a user views a stream or selects a caption, become degraded. This problem becomes noticeable in case of portable terminals which are demanded of downsizing and have a limited screen size for their portability feature.
The caption display device also displays a video image and a caption line corresponding to the displayed video image as well as previous caption lines to the displayed caption line (history of caption lines). This limits information which is acquired from caption lines and a video image.